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Google Receiving 'Alarming' Number of Censorship Requests from Western Democracies

Censorship requests are on the rise, according to a new report from Google, and it isn’t just from places like China. The search giant said today that it has received an “alarming” number of censorship requests in the last six months from western democracies that should know better.

According to a blog post from Google Senior Policy Analyst Dorothy Chou, the company has received requests from countries such as Spain, Poland Germany, the United Kingdom and more. In the United States, most cases were requests from law enforcement to remove harassing content or depictions of police brutality. Google did not comply. Writes Chou:

Unfortunately, what we’ve seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different. When we started releasing this data, in 2010, we noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it’s not.

This is the fifth data set that we’ve released. Just like every other time, we’ve been asked to take down political speech. It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect – western democracies not typically associated with censorship.”

According to the Guardian, Google also receives a lot of requests to remove content based on copyright infringement, which it complies with about 97% of the time.

Part of this feels like an attempt by Google to align itself with freedom and openness and distract from accusations of data theft and spying. But this is a year when we’ve seen extensive government efforts to rein in the internet, from SOPA to the Megaupload shutdown and more. These data continue to paint a picture of world governments trying to control what gets posted on the internet, while companies like Google continue to advocate for a much larger degree of freedom.

This increase also comes from many new countries that hadn’t ever requested content removed before – probably a sign that more governments around the world are taking the internet seriously. But it’s disappointing to see some of the regressive requests in Google’s report – things like a request to remove videos of someone urinating on a passport, or a politician trying to nix blogs that criticized his policies. Freedom of speech can be an uphill struggle.

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